A question on oil setup.

[mICHAEL]

In my current game I've managed to screw up my OIl network,due to too many pipes,and it's impossible to fix it,as that would require a total rebuild of the sytem,which would lead to me loosing oil,due to the number of Storage tanks I put in,in places which get in the way. Is it possible to setup a loop system oil network,which when I get Advanced Oil processing will refine heavy to light,then light to Petroleum,and transfer it to the storage tanks in question,with little management by me,when I have it in place? As I find myself needing a steady supply of Plastics and Batteries mostly,maybe some Lubricant later,so I need my petroleum gas supply to keep up with demand.

[einsteiner]

If you have access to fluid handling and some lubricant, you can make small pumps to force the crude oil into a different set of tanks, so you can demolish stuff to rebuild without losing your stored oil. As far as handling petroleum gas demand, it works really well to convert all your heavy oil to light oil, and light oil to gas. You don't need to do anything special, just plumb it up right.

[ssilk]

Moved from General, leaving a link

[The_Hunted_One]

I can post a picture of my setup if there's interest, but I have exactly as einsteiner suggested, with 5 storage tanks for heavy, light, and petroleum, then 3 chem plants for converting down the chain to petroleum. My only problem is gathering enough crude oil to keep the refiners working.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

My setup is fairly noobish, but it seems to work fairly efficiently:

Typically, my petroleum processing is geographically close to my boilers because they both require water and generally draw from the same lake. Also there's probably a coal belt in the vicinity that has been feeding said boilers so the making of plastics is going to be conveniently located as well.

Phase one is your pumpjacks. Wherever they are, they all feed into the same pipeline that heads to your refinery. Refinery has three basic outputs: heavy, light, and petrol. There's one buffer tank for each of these fluids before they go from there.

Heavy is split off to make lubricant, at least one tank full, for future projects and to keep it from backing up. Light is used to make solid fuel, which then goes down to run my boilers. Petrol goes off to make all the useful things. If heavy starts backing up anyway, have it split to also make solid fuel.

Once you get advanced petroleum research and change your ratios, heavy can be swapped from making solid to making light. Light still makes solid fuel for the boilers, because by now you've diverted all of your coal off your boilers and to plastics production. However, if you find it backing up, you can crack it down to petrol. Petroleum Gas, of course, continues making the useful things.

I find that this setup tends to be good at keeping things from backing up without having tons of tanks all over the place. It consumes everything in the earlier stages before you can get the advanced petroleum research which requires blue packs and provides a useful byproduct of keeping your boilers running efficiently. Also, once your initial pumpjacks run almost but not quite dry and is no longer able to keep up with demand, forcing you to start importing barrels of crude from more remote sources, you can continue producing solid fuel out of the 0.1 production to keep your boilers running indefinitely, even long after your coal has to also be outsourced.